The phone abruptly stopped ringing. Allie had answered.
Graham rolled over on the cool, shadowed sheet.
To the side of the bed near the vent.
Lying on his stomach, he nestled his forehead in the warm crook of his arm and guiltily listened.
Chapter 6
ALLIE drifted up from indecipherable dreams, pulled like a hooked sea creature by some sound … she wasn’t sure what. Then she felt a moment of panic as the jangling phone chilled her mind. She hated to be awakened by phone calls; almost always they meant bad news. The worst of life happened at night.
Oblivious, Sam was snoring beside her, sleeping deeply on his side with one arm flung gracefully off the mattress as if he’d just hurled something at the wall. As she reached for the phone, Allie glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Only quarter to twelve. She’d thought she’d slept longer, that it was early morning. Maybe the phone call wasn’t bad news. Maybe somebody who thought everyone stayed up till midnight.
The darkness in the humid bedroom felt like warm velvet as she extended her arm through it and groped for the phone. She pulled the entire unit to her so she could lift the receiver and quiet it as quickly as possible. No sense in letting the damned thing wake Sam.
She settled her head back on the pillow, in control now, and pressed the cool plastic receiver to her ear. Her palm was damp, slippery on the phone’s smooth surface. She had to adjust her grip to hold on. “‘Lo.”
“I want to speak with Sam, please.” A woman’s voice. Young. Tense. And something else: angry.
“Who’s calling?”
“Tell him Lisa.”
“Well, listen, Lisa, Sam’s asleep.” Something cold and ugly moved in Allie’s stomach. Its twin awoke in her mind. “Is it important? About work?”
“Not about work.” Was that a laugh? “I don’t work with Sam. But it’s important, all right.”
Allie didn’t say anything. She was fighting all the way up from sleep, reaching out for answers and finding only questions. Lisa … Did she and Sam know a Lisa? Had Sam ever mentioned the name?
Lisa said, “Gonna let me talk to him?”
“It’s almost midnight; he’s asleep. Sure it can’t wait till morning?”
“It can’t wait.”
Allie stared into deeper darkness where she knew ceiling met walls. A corner; no way out. “Hold on.”
She nudged Sam’s ribs and whispered his name.
He rolled over, facing her. She caught a whiff of his warm breath, the wine they’d had with dinner. His upper chest and neck gathered pale light but his face was in shadow. “Whazzit?”
“You awake?”
“‘Course not.”
“Well, you got a phone call. Woman named Lisa.”
“She on the line now?”
“Now. Waiting. ”
Sam was quiet for a long time. Allie could hear him breathing rapidly. She felt her world sliding out from under her. It was making her sick, dizzy. Too casually, he said, “Tell her I’ll call her in the morning.”
Allie pressed the receiver back to the side of her head, so hard that it hurt. She gave Lisa Sam’s message.
“You’re his wife,” Lisa said, sounding furious and determined. “I know he’s married, ‘cause I followed him home from my apartment. Saw you two through the window, then saw you come out together and followed you. Saw how you acted together. Tell him that. Explain to him I know his name’s really Jones, just like it says on his mailbox. Tell him he better fucking talk to me, or I’ll talk a lot more to you.”
Allie listened to her own breathing. “I don’t think I will tell him. Anyway, he’s asleep again.”
“I really think you should.”
“Sorry, I don’t agree. You’ve got a lot of your facts wrong, Lisa.”
“Not the essential one. Wake up Sam, if he really is asleep. Put him on the goddamn phone.”
“No.”
Lisa laughed, not with humor. The bitter sound seem to flow from the phone like bile. “You poor, dumb bitch.” She hung up. Hard.
Allie lay unmoving, the receiver droning in her ear. The darkness closed in on her tightly, making it difficult to breathe. Poor, dumb bitch … There had been more than bitterness in Lisa’s voice; there had been pity. Allie slowly extended her arm, hung up the receiver with a tentative clatter of plastic on plastic. The buzzing of the broken connection continued in her head, like an insect droning.
After a while she said, “Sam?”
Seconds passed before he said, “Hmmm?” Drowsy. Pretending to be asleep. Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe hope could make it so, glue it where it was broken so nobody would know the difference and nothing was changed from the time they’d gone to sleep.
But Allie knew it couldn’t be repaired.
“Lisa told me to say she knew you were married. That she followed you home.”
He gave a long, phony sigh, as if this didn’t concern him and he resented it interfering with his rest. “Whaddya say her name was?”
“Lisa.”
“Last name?”
“You tell me.”
Nothing but silence from the darkness on Sam’s side of the bed. A jetliner roared overhead like a lion in a distant jungle. The echo of traffic rushed like flowing black water in the night.
She watched him in silhouette. “She’ll call back, Sam.”
Lying on his stomach, he raised himself up so that his upper body was propped on his elbows, head hanging to stare at his pillow. It was a posture of despair. His hair had fallen down over his forehead and was in his eyes. “Yeah, I guess she will.”
Allie said in the calm voice of a stranger, “Who is she, Sam?”
He flopped over to lie on his back. The mattress swayed beneath his shifting bulk; springs squealed. The back of his hand brushed her bare thigh and quickly withdrew, as if he’d touched something forbidden.
“Sam?”
“Yeah.” Resigned.
“Who is she?”
“A girl, is all.”
Allie was thrown by the simple evasiveness of his answer. He was speaking to her as if she were twelve years old. She didn’t like what was welling up in her but she couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t even put a name to it. “Christ, is that what she is, a girl is all? Is that what you’ve got to say, like some goddamned adolescent caught two-timing his steady?”
“I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. But really, that’s all she is to me.”
“Sam, that’s so shabby. So fucking banal.”
“So maybe I’m banal. I’m sorry about that too.”
He was working up anger now, preferring it to guilt. The hell with him. He wasn’t fooling her.
“How long you two been being banal together?” she asked.
“This isn’t an ongoing relationship,” he said. “Something happened one time. Only one. Damn it, Allie, I wish it hadn’t happened. I sure didn’t plan it. Neither did she.”
“God’s plan, huh?” she said bitterly.
“More like the devil’s,” Sam said. “A moment of weakness on my part, and it led to something. I thought that kinda thing only happened to the clowns on soap operas, but I was wrong.”
She said, “I don’t believe things like that just happen, Sam.”
“But they do. Then the people involved regret it but can’t change the past. Please, Allie, try to understand this. Try not to be—”
“Try not to be what?” she interrupted.
“I dunno. Naive, I guess.”
She sat up, and switched on the lamp by the bed. Sam twisted his head away from the light, shielding his eyes, as if he might decompose under the glare like Dracula caught in the sun. Allie knew it was the truth that was making him come apart.
“You have to do that?” he asked. “Turn on that damned light?”
“What do you mean by naive? That I trusted you?”
Now he did roll onto his side to face her, his head resting on his upper arm so that his cheek was scrunched up. His eyes were still narrowed to the light. “No. But I don’t want you to think an accidental affair with another woman means anything important.” He scooted toward her, touched her hip gently with his fingertips, making her suddenly aware and ashamed of her nakedness. She pulled away violently, startling him. “Allie, please!”